The Conference

We Speak for Ourselves: A Poet, a Prophet, and Voices for the 21st Century

In 2008, the Warren Center hosted a conference related to Robert Penn Warren’s volume Who Speaks for the Negro? Involved in the conference were many people Warren had interviewed for the book as well as younger activists involved in contemporary social movements. The program included keynote talks by Angela Davis and the Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr; a panel presentation by Houston A. Baker, Richard H. King, and Ruth Turner Perot; and workshop discussions with conference participants about the U.S. civil rights movement and the current state of various social justice issues. This section of the website contains a list of conference participants, videos from the conference sessions, and notes that were taken during the workshop discussions.

Original materials provided by the University of Kentucky and Yale University libraries and digitized with the permission of the Warren estate. Digital archive created and designed by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.